Many businesses and users depend on electronic mail (“email”) for communication. These different users may rely on email to send messages and share files. A user might receive between twenty-five and two hundred emails a day and send between ten and eighty emails a day. In some cases, the user will add attachments to the emails before sending to another user. Some of these attachments may be relatively small in size (e.g., less than 1 MB) whereas other attachments may be relatively large (e.g., greater than 5 MB).
Managing all of this data can be very challenging both for the user and for the businesses. In the case of the user, controlling who has access to an attachment can be difficult and time consuming. For example, a user might encrypt emails or password protect attachments intended for particular recipients. Businesses, on the other hand, may be attempting to manage all of this data and the email service on their own premises (“on-premise”). For example, a business may deploy servers on-premise to provide the email service. Providing an on-promise email service, however, can be costly, not only due to upkeep of the computers but also in administrators to manage the email service.